Inspecting the 277

Today we hopefully started on a complete inspection of Illinois Terminal car 277, with the goal of being able to operate it on Member's Day this year. Stan W. moved it over to the pit yesterday.

I inspected the compressors and parts of the air brake system. This car has two compressors (actually, it has three, but the third is for the air conditioning system, which we'll ignore for now) since it was essentially used as a locomotive, pulling one or more trailers on a regular basis. I lubricated them, meggered the armatures, and cleaned the filters. One of the compressors looks very good; the other may be marginal. We'll test them next week when Rod is here. Also I did the reverser and looked at the contactor group. Stan inspected the line breakers and repainted the arc chutes with Glyptal. Stan and Joe Stupar will be doing the motors; I had to leave before they had started this part of the inspection. Scott Greig is doing the controller. I also fastened down the trolley hook securely.

Here we see a couple of views of the upper stained glass windows in the car. On the 277 they were left in place, and covered over with sheet metal in the 1930's to make the car look more "modern." On the CA&E cars they were removed and discarded, and replaced with wood. We have no plans to return the 277 to its earlier design, since we'd also have to remove the air conditioning and completely rebuild the underbody equipment to be historically accurate.

Here's what the interior of the 277 looks like today. All of the seats along one side of the car were removed several years ago to facilitate some of the rebuilding that needs to be done. The 277 also has parts for the 518 and Peoria stored inside; we'll have to sort through these parts sometime soon.

I also started looking at the 518. The interior is basically in very good shape. Two inside windows were missing, but I located them in the 277. They need to be refinished, as do most of the others still on the car. Here are the first two on the operating table in the 321.

The Illinois Terminal cars are an exciting new project. And as mentioned before, additional help would be welcome!